


all in

by searwrites (sears)



Series: dudebro au [3]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: College, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, aggressive/somewhat violent behavior, boys being bad at feelings, dudebro!au, dumb stoner boyfriends, mentions divorce/daddy issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-17
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-02-05 00:14:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1798480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sears/pseuds/searwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a continuation of dudebro au from an anonymous request on tumblr: "Can I prompt ErenJean dudebro au where they have the ~talk~ about future/college/relationship w/e you think it might be relevant for them? I love that au and I think you can really explore the erejean dynamic there!"</p>
            </blockquote>





	all in

The stars seem fit to burst tonight, so bright it makes Eren squint, the pointed tips of them stretching to the edge of his vision in faded beams. There’s smoke curling up above their heads, reaching towards the sky like detached, ghastly arms. The only thing artificial about the glow out here at night is the cherry on Jean’s joint.

Eren’s legs feel so heavy as they hang off the edge of the half pipe; so much so that he’s afraid the paperweights that are his feet will drag him off of it completely. But then Jean’s voice hits him like an anchor, his head right next to Eren’s above where their shoulders are slotted together— a parallel warmth.

"What do you think of health sciences?" he asks.

Eren snorts and chuckles as his amusement runs away from him, all out of breath and messy. “What kind of a fucking question is that? How high  _are_  you right now?”

Jean shrugs, Eren can feel it rustle the hairs at the crown of his head. They shouldn’t fit so well on such a small piece of shitty plywood, but it’s like their bodies have adapted to it— recognized a shape and adjusted, made room for each other. It’s in this lull of thinking how well they fit together that Eren realizes that Jean isn’t laughing.

"That what you wanna go to school for, then?" Eren asks, scowling up at the sky, like these smudged out fading stars are the ones taking Jean away from him.

Jean shrugs again, and then says, “I meant more for you than me.”

There’s a silence that follows, one that Eren knows is intentional. He’s catching him unarmed, striking him when he knows he has the inclination to sit and think about what it is Jean’s saying. To ponder the idea that he could somehow make a living teaching kids to skate, or play basketball. To imply that Eren could find something to do with his life that would be more than just a paycheck.

Except all it makes Eren’s weed-hazed mind do is trail off to thinking about Armin. Armin in his rooms made of wood, forced into making decisions that impact the rest of his life before he’s even had a chance to try being an adult. How are you supposed to know what you want when you can barely decide what you’re going to eat for dinner that night?

"I’m not going to college," Eren says gruffly.

"I know, you’ve said," Jean replies quickly, his voice closing off in a way that makes Eren hate the way he’s so quick to snap at him, even now.

And he hates even more having to say this, because he’s giving Jean an out, but still— he turns his head to the side, takes in the shadowed curve of Jean’s ear, and says, “But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to.”

Jean inhales deep, the curve of his cheek and the tip of his nose illuminated in orange from the drag of the joint. Eren watches him exhale, the way his face turns grey again as the haze rises above their heads.

Jean’s voice is clipped by the tickle of smoke when he says, “I know.”

Eren shuffles closer without even realizing it, starts nuzzling his nose into the soft hair at Jean’s temple, pulling back a little when Jean’s head lolls to the side so they’re looking right at each other in the dark. The stars are an afterthought now— the backlight to some old film Eren’s had on repeat in the back of his mind, the one that never ends well.

"Did you have somewhere in mind?" Eren asks quietly, taking the joint when Jean hands it to him.

He turns his head to pull a drag and exhale, and then settles his face even closer to Jean’s. He’s peppering small kisses all across what he can reach of Jean’s cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, and he doesn’t notice it until Jean starts laughing softly and reaches up to shove at his shoulder.

"Fucking snuggly asshole," Jean mutters with his eyes closed, sounding hopelessly gone on Eren’s baked desire for affection.

Eren, on a small paranoid impulse, leans up quickly to take a squinted glance around the very obviously empty backyard, and then flops back down to clumsily grab the side of Jean’s face so he can kiss him like this.  _"Like Spiderman,"_  Jean said to him once, smiling so hard his eyes were slits, and Eren punched him to mask the need to kiss him again harder.

Jean usually shoves him away and tells him to fuck off at times like this— when Eren’s being particularly sketch about people seeing them together, and failing to hide it— but this time he melts under Eren’s mouth and his hands. Eren even feels oddly proud of this, until Jean shoots it sharp and cold dead when he says, “I’ve been looking at schools in California.”

It hits Eren like a spear to the throat, swift and sudden, and impressively abrupt in its ability to make Eren feel like he can’t breathe anymore. He only pulls his face away because it feels like he’s suffocating, but Jean takes it as something else, turns his head back up towards the sky.

This is the beginning of the end, Eren thinks, as he willfully forces himself to count stars as a distraction from the fucking bomb Jean just dropped on them.

 

—

 

Eren manages to force himself to forget about it, to keep from jumping down Jean’s throat to ask him why, when, and other equally clingy reassurances, and they manage to progress as normal. And for all Eren is keeping a brave face about the whole thing, it’s only marginally killing him from the inside out to think that Jean actually might want to leave him.

It’s a selfish way to think of it, Eren knows, so he doesn’t. Think of it, that is.

Nearing on the fourth time this week alone Eren trudges up to Jean’s room with him after school. This room has grown achingly familiar, and not for the reasons it used to be. This isn’t Armin’s room anymore— isn’t even Armin’s home— Jean and his ridiculously huge and endearing presence has eclipsed all that now.

Jean tosses his backpack into the corner and falls backwards to his bed, face up. He’s grinning at Eren in that way he does when he knows what’s coming, because they’ve probably both been anticipating it since Jean sucked Eren’s tongue into his mouth after tugging him beneath the shadow of the stairwell at lunch time, the thrill of graduation still real even from earlier in the week. It was a few, blissfully uninterrupted seconds, and that’s about all Eren wanted to let Jean get away with.

So here he sprawls, wide and on display, tilting his hips to show Eren he’s been waiting, thinking about it. Probably chewed the shit out of the tip of his pen in his last period political science class, the one he usually claims to fall asleep in because the teacher’s voice is  _"made of honey"_  (Eren is not at all jealous, no, because Mr. Smith is old and gross). Jean even goes so far as to smirk when he starts tearing away at the velcro of his own shorts, and then Eren pounces— partly because he, too, is a teenage boy who’s been waiting way too many hours for this, but also because that small v-shaped patch of pale skin below the line of Jean’s hips Eren has decided is for  _his_  eyes only— and sometimes feels the inexplicable need to protect Jean’s body from the world around them.

Jean just says Eren’s a possessive girlfriend, but fuck him.

It’s in this tumbling mess of limbs that Eren notices his own shirt balled up in the corner of Jean’s room with the rest of his dirty laundry. Jean’s mouth is hotly making itself at home on the soft skin of Eren’s neck, but now Eren is curious; one of his decks is in the corner, the one that Jean tried to paint on; his laptop charger is balled in a knot on Jean’s desk, the one he’s been looking for all week; and then the fucking dumb strip of photobooth pictures Jean forced him into when they went to the mall to shop for graduation gifts for each other is propped up against his monitor to the side of that. The shot on the bottom is of Jean’s tongue in Eren’s ear, and Eren’s face all scrunched up in a flinch.

The timing isn’t exactly great— not with Jean’s mouth sucking marks just below the visible line of Eren’s tshirt on his collarbone, both of their pants pulled down to their thighs— but Eren can’t fucking help but think about it now. If Jean leaves, he doesn’t just lose a boyfriend, or whatever materialistic term they give to people that hold hands in public. He’d be losing his best friend again.

"Hey," Jean says, nudging Eren’s distracted face with his nose, "Get the oil.”

Jean not-so-discretely stole a bottle of his mom’s massage oil, and it’s been a permanent fixture in his side table ever since. All-out-ass-fucking is still a little too scary for Eren to really stop and think about, but hands, mouths and slick skin are more than welcome. He reaches over and ends up knocking the little plastic bottle off the bedside table completely, Jean’s hard dick through his shorts pushing up and up, shoving him off balance. The bottle is smeared in oil and fingerprints, incriminating isn’t quite the word, so it’s no wonder it’s hard to get a grip on.

Except when Eren leans down off the bed to pick it up, he’s met with a half-opened paper binder full of leaflets and various printed papers. He tilts his head to get a better look and what he sees makes it feel like the world just  _stops_  for a minute.

College applications.

UCSD, UCLA, CSU LA, CSU Long Beach. There’s about a 2 inch high stack of fucking photoprint paper all glaring with the same message — Jean is going back to California.

Eren snatches the entire paper folder up, forgetting about the oil entirely, and shoving Jean’s stupidly insistent hips back down to the bed, because this is not the fucking time.

“What the fuck is this?” Eren says, brandishing the folder and ignoring the few leaflets that fall out of it. This is way more incriminating than the oil to Jean, if the look on his face is anything to go by.

Jean just gapes at him, opens his mouth a few times like he doesn’t know what to say.

“This isn’t even one place, dude, these schools are all over the fucking state,” Eren practically yells, opening the folder to rifle through the papers, and then getting pissed off halfway and dropping the whole thing entirely to glare at Jean again. “You really just want to fucking leave, don’t you?”

Now Jean finds his voice. “If I wanted to leave so bad these wouldn’t be only in California.”

Eren scoffs, and the way Jean is looking at him now — defensive, like Eren’s the one doing something wrong, like all these stupid little hints Jean has been dropping were supposed to be the buffer for this — makes it feel like someones ripping his heart out of his chest.

“Whatever,” he says, his voice tight, moving to get off of Jean— or rather, to get out of this room entirely.

Jean quickly grabs his forearm before he can escape. “Look, I wanted to talk to you about this, I think you would—”

“Save it dude, I’m not going to school,” Eren snaps.

“I’m not asking you to go, I’m asking you to sit and have a fucking conversation with me about it.”

Eren yanks his arm out of Jean’s grip, hard enough for the imprint of his fingers to leave red marks against his skin, and then he’s stumbling away from Jean’s bed like he’d just fought some kind of battle on it. He’s about to just say fuck it and storm out of here— that’s that, nice knowing you, bye forever— but something pulls him back, this stupid phantom tug that always makes it difficult to get too far away from Jean.

“Of all fucking people to try and convince me into doing this shit, Jean— I don’t  _want_  it. I hate school, I’ve  _always_  hated school—”

Jean is on his feet now, approaching Eren like he’s an animal that’s spooked, his voice low and level as he says, “Eren if you just stopped for one fucking second—”

“Nah, fuck you man.”

Eren decides the best course of action is to leave before more damage can be done, and he only slams the door behind him without about a quarter of the strength his anger wanted him to.

 

—

 

Ever since Eren’s dad left, he’s gotten into the habit of pondering things too deeply. Jean says it’s normal, it’s part of growing up, but Eren disagrees. He thinks it’s more along the line of feeling betrayed and trying to find a reason for it— even if there is none. Some people just suck, and that’s all there is to it.

But this is a little different, Eren begrudgingly admits. Where his dad up and left overnight, with only his sour-ass mood as any kind of warning, Jean has been kind of obvious about it. Reconnecting with old friends from California, trying to get Eren to finally log into his facebook so they can add him because they’re curious about Jean’s elusive new boyfriend. Even so much as trying to get Eren to watch surf competitions with him whenever they’re streaming live— it’s just… it’s not betrayal, but it hurts almost as much.

Despite Jean’s (and everyone Eren’s ever known, really) insistence on him being The Boy With No Regrets, he really does regret the way he reacted that day at Jean’s. This isn’t just about Eren, it’s about them  _both_ , and Eren knows that, but he’s too scared to confront it— too afraid that if he lets Jean talk, it’ll be to break it off. His mind feels like it’s running a mile a minute now, which is starting to become a familiar feeling, so Eren does what he has to do to get the frantic tangle of anxiety out— he skates.

Only where he would usually just show up at Jean’s house, instead he goes to the park. It’s after hours, so he has to hop the fence, but it’s not like anyone patrols the area— and Eren just isn’t quite ready to admit any kind of apology to Jean, not yet.

And he’s not even surprised when about barely half an hour into his session, he hears the telltale metallic clink of someone climbing the gate to jump it. Jean’s never been very good at taking a hint, so of course he followed him here.

“Hey,” Jean says, approaching Eren slow, like they haven’t had nearly all parts of each other’s bodies in their mouths, at one point or another. “You know, my house has a ramp you don’t have to jump a fence for bro, just sayin’.”

Eren keeps skating, his cheeks heating in embarrassment as he scuffs his wheels and almost peels out on a turn in efforts to make it seem like Jean being here isn’t affecting him.

“Needed more space, you know.”

“There’s space in California,” Jean says, not at all subtly, “Lots of it.”

Eren skids to a stop, glaring at Jean like he’s disgusted for him having even said the fabled C-word, when really he’s kind of relieved.

“Fuck off, dude,” he grumbles, and forces himself to continue skating, the industrial rumble of the wheels against cheap plywood a weak attempt at drowning out his thoughts.

Jean is quick though, and in an echo of the other night, he catches Eren by the arm, nearly sends him stumbling as his board skids out from beneath his feet. On an impulse of being startled by nearly falling, he shoves Jean backwards with two hands to the chest, and then immediately feels like shit for it with how hurt Jean’s eyes look.

“Fuck, sorry,” Eren half-mumbles, and then he hitches his sweatshirt up his shoulders, covers the back of his neck from the night chill with his hood. “Like, you don’t have to make such a fucking big deal about it dude, just leave.” Jean looks even more wounded by this, but Eren barrels on, saying, “You want to go, then go. Why are you even here?”

Jean looks stunned into silence, so Eren goes to grab his board, but Jean pulls him up by the edges of his sweater, hauls him about as aggressive as Eren’s ever seen Jean, right up in his face. Eren is shocked enough to let him do it.

“Because if you would just listen to me for  _two fucking seconds_  you would know that I don’t give half a shit if you want to go to school or not.”

Eren’s brow creases. “What?”

“Come with me to California,” Jean says, sounding as desperate as he looks, still clutching at Eren like it’s  _Eren_  who’s threatening to leave.

“I told you—”

“Not for school, you idiot. Just come with me. Get a job,  _stay with me._  Skate at night without freezing your balls off for once, learn to surf— I’ll teach you,” Jean says, all in a rush.

Eren blinks, confused for reasons he isn’t quite sure of just yet. Jean wants to leave, but he wants Eren to leave with him?

“You want me to come to Cali and bum off your student loans and your apartment or dorm or whatever?”

Jean finally lets him go, levels him a much more familiar _‘seriously?’_  look, and says, “I said get a job, bro, you wouldn’t even let yourself bum off me if I asked you to.”

Eren just sort of stands there stupidly, staring at Jean like he just cut a slit in his skull and all his brains are leaking out of it, because what is he supposed to say to this? All he can really add is a half-dazed, “Why?”

Jean grunts a little, “What do you mean why?”

“I mean like…  _why_ , why?”

“You’re gonna make me say it like this, really? This how it’s gonna be?”

Eren lets loose a violently spastic shrug, as if to say  _‘what the fuck are you talking about?’_ , even though Eren knows very well what he means. It’s like poking a dog with a stick— that kind of morbid curiosity that wants to see how far you can push something before it snaps.

Jean makes a choked noise, high in the back of his throat, that makes it sound like he’s dying.

“Because I’m in love with you. And I care about you too, and I don’t want you to feel like you’re stuck here, because you’re not.”

It’s the first time anyone’s ever said that to Eren without referencing school, so it makes him a little slow on the uptake. All he can say is, “You swear you’re being serious?”

“Yes, jesus.”

Eren scratches the back of his neck, looks around the park for bystanders he knows aren’t there. This is pulling him wide open, stripping him down worse than if he’d accidentally shown up at school naked. He’s not even looking for people to hide from when he glances around the park— more that he’s looking for someone to magically appear with an answer.

“What about my mom?” he asks.

“She’s an adult. And she wants what’s best for you, and what’s best for you isn’t here.”

Eren knows most of that is Jean trying to convince himself more than anyone else, but he immediately knows what he’s really trying to say. They both know that California isn’t what’s best for Eren— but that Jean is.

And with this comes the sinking realization that Jean just said he loved him, and Eren didn’t say it back. There’s even a tiny frown at the corner of Jean’s mouth that says he has definitely noticed this. Eren hates Jean’s frown, but worse than that he hates being able to see how disappointed someone is in you without them having to say anything at all.

All this does is make him think of his mom sitting nursing a steaming cup of coffee alone at the dinner table at six in the morning the day after his dad left them.

“I can’t just  _leave_ ,” he says quietly.

Jean’s face falls like Eren’s just tripped it down a flight of stairs, and he says, “Alright,” and then turns to leave. Eren feels like shit, but he’s forcing himself to believe that it’s better to do this now than to wait and have Jean watch him fail when there’s a hell of a lot more at stake.

 

—

 

Eren’s lazing about the living room in a pair of long boxers and one of Jean’s Volcom tanks— which he hadn’t even realized was Jean’s until he recognized his smell on it. It makes him feel hopeless and depressing, so he decides to spend more time downstairs with his mom. It’s also because this kind of gaping sadness makes it easier to see how much other people are hurting. His mom is just good at hiding how lonely she is.

“What do you think about Cali?” he asks her, spinning the thin remote control for the DVR in his hand, making himself look distracted.

“It’s expensive and very beautiful,” she replies quickly, sitting cross legged on the recliner with her mug of coffee held in both her palms. It’s after ten at night, which is a new record for her. “Why do you ask?”

“Jean’s looking at schools there.”

“Oh,” his mother looks up, her eyes flicking to Eren in interest at the sudden blatant severity of the conversation they’re having. “Are you…?”

“ _No_ , I’m not going to school, you know this already.”

“I know, but you could change your mind,” she says, and then takes a tiny sip from her mug. “He’s from there, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Eren says, and then he drops the remote on his stomach, stretches out his legs on the two seater so he can look up at the faded paint on the ceiling. “He wants me to go with him.”

“What?”

“Like, get a job. Learn to surf. Live with him.”

“That’s a big step,” she says, and even though she’s known about them for quite some time, her knowing tone makes Eren cringe a little.

“That’s why I said I couldn’t.”

“Is that all you said?” she asks.

Eren shrugs. “Pretty much.”

“Well, he always mentioned taking a semester off and starting in spring,” she says casually, surprising Eren with how much she actually pays attention to what Jean says on the rare occasions they all have dinner here, “So you have time to decide, right?”

Eren whips his head from the ceiling to look at her, because he may be hearing this wrong but— is she saying she’d be okay with this? He doesn’t outright ask her, but it makes him think.

 

—

 

Eren realizes that his mom probably looked a hell of a lot more lonely the day after his father left because Eren wasn’t even there. He came traipsing in at six o’clock in the morning to pick up a fresh tshirt and socks, and then kissed her hair and went to school.

What had happened was Eren caught his father packing the car while his mother was still at work. The one fucking day he decided not to go to Jean’s, and this was what he came home to. His dad didn’t even have the decency to look guilty— just looked more flustered at being caught, like having to explain himself to his son was an inconvenience. He gripped Eren’s shoulder in a sort of pseudo-manly gesture of affection and told Eren that  _“even the best of us get too curious for our own good,”_ whatever the fuck that meant.

The thing Eren hadn’t expected was the sudden urgent need to be near Jean. Watching the back of his father’s car drive away from their town after months of tension at home just felt like stabbing an already open wound— you know it’s going to hurt, but you don’t really realize how much until it happens.

By the time he was at Jean’s doorstep he could barely see for tears in his eyes, and Jean didn’t even ask, it was like he just knew. Or maybe he had no idea, and it just didn’t matter— but either way. He tugged Eren inside, and then up the stairs, and kissed his gross swollen face until he stopped crying. He even endured Eren’s rant about how being educated doesn’t make you a better person, how his father went to school for half his life to become a doctor and look how fucking vile he turned out.

Jean just took Eren’s angrily shaking hand in his, lifted it to kiss his knuckles, and said, “I think sometimes people are just born assholes— no rhyme or reason to it.”

Eren just nodded and made this pathetic, needy noise until Jean pulled him into the bed with him, let Eren cling to him like a child waiting out a storm. He couldn’t even bring himself to think of his mother— her coming home to an empty house, half of her bedroom emptied and more than likely a mess because of it. He should’ve told her where he was, but part of him knew she would know. There’s no chance he would choose that asshole over wherever Jean was.

And that’s the thing, really. People are always coming and going, in some way or another. But then what about the people that get you through it, what happens when they leave? What would Eren have done if Jean hadn’t let him burrow beneath his blanket that night, where would he have hopelessly wandered off to?

It doesn’t help to think about that kind of thing, but Eren is a glutton for self pity right now, so he does.

 

—

 

Jean gets accepted to 4 out of the 12 or so schools he applied to, which isn’t a great ratio on paper, but it’s good enough for Jean. Where Eren has had a sort of effortless senior year, Jean actually had to study. Which made it all the more convenient for Eren to come to Jean’s, because he could annoy him while he pined over the work at his desk, could even tease Jean with the answers to his homework by way of sexual favors.

All it means is that Jean gets to pick. He decides on UCSD— San Diego.

The rest all happens in sort of a blur. By the end of the month, he’s already picked out an apartment; a place north of La Jolla ( _“the rich-ass richie town,”_  as Jean so eloquently puts it), far enough from the beach for it to be somewhat affordable if he can find a roommate. It kind of feels like the last nail in the coffin, so to speak.

They’ve been talking, but it’s been noticably stilted and awkward. Jean keeps trying to slip into ‘the talk’, but Eren is good at dodging it, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever be ready to hear it. If he hears Jean even mention the word ‘break’, he’ll lose it. Unfortunately this means that on the run up to Jean leaving in the winter, they don’t talk all that much. As emotionally ignorant as he knows he can be, pretending it isn’t happening isn’t going to make it any easier— he knows this.

Jean leaves for the airport, and their goodbye feels like the most anticlimactic depressing thing. Eren hugged Jean at his house, and was half hoping Jean would ask him to come to the airport with him, but he didn’t. Eren left Jean’s house at the same time Jean did, and that was it.

Eren ends up jogging home afterwards, his throat sore with his efforts not to cry, like someone stuck a wad of cotton down it, and he can’t swallow over it. It all breaks when he gets to his room, though, and he collapses to his bed in a mess of heaving sobs and stutters, so he really isn’t all that surprised when his mom quietly enters the room not long after him.

She doesn’t say anything, though. She never was one for being condescending. Instead she just sits on the edge of Eren’s bed and strokes down his back in that way she used to when he was a kid and she was trying to get him to sleep. Her nails are always just long enough to scratch through the fabric of his tshirts, the thin gold bracelets around her wrist clinking in the now calmed silence of the room.

It’s a testament to the fact that while they might not seem very close on the surface, no one knows him better than his mom. Except maybe Jean, but that feels like a sharp physical pain to think about right now.

All she does is wait until he’s quieted down, and then — very gently — asks, “What are you so afraid of?”

“It would be way worse if I fucked it up out there,” Eren replies easily, his voice muffled by the fabric of his pillow.

“Sweetie, if you fuck up out there, or something happens to you, all that means is you come back here.”

Her tone is still soft, her hand still moving in soothing strokes down his back, but Eren ends up turning on his back to look at her any way. She moves to stroking his bare bicep instead, her fingers gently tapping his skin,  _“spiders crawling down,”_  she’d say when he was little.

She continues, saying, “You will always have a home with me, you know that right?”

Eren doesn’t know anything anymore. He probably couldn’t even skate this off— it feels like he’s forgotten how to move. All he can manage to do is throw an arm over his eyes to hide how swollen they are from crying, and pathetically mumble, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“Well,” his mom says, her bracelets making that familiar soft sound again as she stops stroking his arm. “This is something I think I can actually help you with.”

Eren is too broken to hope, so he turns back over and sleeps off his pained exhaustion as much as he can.

 

—

 

Eren ends up on about 50 different websites looking for jobs. Joiners, welders, plumbers. All trades that pay surprisingly well, and most offer apprenticeships or training. There’s the more attainable retail and restaurant service, which would be alright too. Even scrubbing grimy beach toilets sounds like a great plan, because he’s decided he’s moving to California.

He takes as many neighborhood yard jobs as the winter will allow to pay for the plane ticket, which isn’t many. The rest he earns by picking up Sasha’s shifts at the diner in their tiny 2 block wide downtown area, and all it does is inject him with a sense of purpose, because if he can do this here, he can do it there too. He can wait tables and be a low earner until he gets his shit together, he can support Jean as much as Jean has consistently supported him.

With this, Eren also makes a conscious effort to talk to Jean more. He logs onto Skype almost nightly, where he was annoyed by the prospect before, and it’s all out of this vague fear that Jean will get over him and find someone else— some old friend from Cali who never said he loved him back when he had the chance, and regretted it ever since, and Eren is so,  _so_  fucking stupid.

Jean is obviously kinda pissed with him, but he still says he misses him every time they hang up the video call, or when Jean has decided it’s late enough to stop texting Eren with the time difference between them, as small as it is. Part of Eren is terrified Jean will still manage to make him talk about what they’re doing, or if they’re together, even from a distance, but he manages to avoid it for the most part.

A month and a half, $500 and change, and it’s not even enough for a one way ticket out there. Apparently everyone and their mother wants to fly west for the early spring.

But then Eren gets a belated Christmas gift from his mom. She’s gotten sharper over the past year, learned to stop biting her tongue when there’s things that need to be said. She hands him an envelope with a single slip of torn paper inside, and on it reads _‘redeem for one plane ticket to California, non-refundable’_.

When Eren looks at her and gapes, swallows back the urge to cry, she says, “Some people are worth chasing after. Not all of them, but some.”

Eren hugs her until his arms ache.

 

 

—

 

 

Touching down at San Diego airport is surreal. He has two bags to his name, a flimsy piece of paper stuffed into his wallet that has Jean’s address scribbled onto it, and then a seemingly unending amount of shaky nerves that make even standing still to wait for his bags at baggage claim a monumental task. The walls behind him are made of glass, from floor to ceiling, held in support by tall, vertical steel beams, and it feels like he’s looking out into his future there— past the construction and the cars, there’s a boy he needs to keep. He gets so wrapped up in the feeling that he almost misses his bags.

The taxi is expensive as shit, but it’s okay. All of that money he earned is a bonus now, even though it isn’t much at all. He’s got about an entire page full of bookmarks on local jobs, and if ever there was a way to get something you want, it’s having the motivation to back it up. Besides, he’s in California now— he’d better get used to shit being overpriced.

The apartment building looks kinda slummy but in a way that makes it almost cool. It’s only two stories with a flat roof and yellowed walls, the iron stairs rusted enough to make Eren worry about falling through them with the packed weight of his bags. There’s a distant panic that makes him worry about this being a bad idea, that maybe he should’ve asked Jean before just showing up like this, but his mom’s words are a necessary comfort—  _“you always have a home with me”_.

By the time he’s knocking on Jean’s door, his entire body is shaking. He timed it on a day where he shouldn’t be at class, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be home— except that all flies out the window, because the door swings open and he’s there, and this is already as Hallmark as Eren will ever get, so the rest just comes tumbling out.

“I love you,” he blurts idiotically, to poor Jean who looks like he’s seen a ghost.

“What the fuck, hi? I love you… too, what even—”

Eren grins like the hopeless fool he is because  _he said it back_ , it’s still real, and then says, “Yeah, hi.”

Jean smiles for a second and then looks like he’s in physical pain, berating himself for being happy or something, and his eyes flick down to Eren’s suitcases on his doorstep.

“You have bags,” Jean says, and Eren’s heart hurts at how his voice sounds thick and wobbly, like he’s holding back tears. “Stayin’ a while?”

Eren shrugs a little, smiling so big his face hurts. “Still looking for a roommate?”

“You serious dude?” Jean asks, his voice cracking a little.

“Yes.”

Eren can barely breathe from the sheer force that Jean tackles him with, the both of them laughing like maniacs, but it doesn’t matter because not everyone has to leave forever— not this time.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to everyone who has ever been kind to me or been supportive in any way (that includes just liking or giving kudos) <3


End file.
